“Maybe you’d trust me more if I told you something.” He paused. “I don’t tell many people about this.” Even Chance seemed curious.
“It’s about my wife, Susan,” Russo said. “I told you she died. I didn’t tell you how.”
I waited. He walked over to the empty fireplace and stared down into its charred hearth. “She was killed. Shot to death, like your husband. Only she was in another man’s arms when it happened. His wife caught on to what was happening before I did. She was waiting for them, I guess. Killed them both, then turned the gun on herself.”
“John-”
“Let me finish. I hated Susan for it at first. But I missed her, too. And I hated missing her. Then I started blaming myself. Homicide detective gets called out in the middle of the night all the time, doesn’t make for much of a home life.
“Anyway, one night, she came back. Her ghost, I suppose. You think I’m crazy?”
“Not at all,” I said.
“Well, I don’t scare easy, but that scared the living hell out me. She asked me to forgive her.”
“She could talk?”
“Yes, can’t your husband talk?”
“It’s not my husband, John.” I turned to Chance. “Can I tell him?”
Chance nodded.
“He’s here, now?” Russo asked, startled.
“Yes, he’s here. It’s Chance Devereaux. He started visiting me the night before the funeral. He wants to be buried in a Catholic cemetery, but as a suicide, they wouldn’t allow it.”
“He told you it wasn’t suicide?”
“Yes. He can’t talk; I think it has something to do with the way he died. But he isn’t so hard to understand once you get used to it. He made it clear that Louise drugged his drink, then shot him while he slept.”
“We’ve suspected something like that,” John said. “He had enough barbiturates in his system to make it seem unlikely that he would have shot himself; but it was right on the borderline, nothing solid enough to convict. Still, I wondered why he would take sleeping pills if he planned on shooting himself that same night. What would the point be? Between that and the insurance, she wasn’t completely in the clear.”
I watched Chance walk over to the fireplace. John followed my gaze.
“He walked over here?” he asked, taking a step back.
“Yes. He wants us to look inside it, under the metal plate in the hearth. The one over the hole where you clean out the ashes.”
Russo got down on all fours and lifted the plate. I wasn’t too surprised when he pulled out a sheaf of papers. Chance touched me on the shoulder, then disappeared.
The papers proved that Chance had warned Emery about the tank eight months before the disaster. One of Emery’s fingerprints had been left at the cabin, on the door to a storage shed. Facing prosecution in the deaths of the workers as well, Emery later broke down and confessed to helping Louise kill David, and told police that Louise had killed Chance. He had been having an affair with Louise Devereaux for the past six months. They met on Wednesdays. They were both convicted of murder.
I saw Chance one other time; when I signed the forms saying I would pay to have his body moved to the Catholic cemetery. He met me near his old grave, and hugged me. He was still warm.
John Russo and I married a year later. When the going gets rough, we tell each other ghost stories.
WHITE TRASH
The woman dressed in black ninja garb moved stealthily across the street, armed with a spray bottle of a popular herbicide purchased at her local hardware store. In the dim light of the streetlamp, she set the spray mechanism to “stream” and went to work. Quickly she moved the bottle in a graceful, sweeping motion. She left as furtively as she had arrived.
Three weeks later, much to the horror of the jerks who lived across the street, a rather obscene directive appeared on their lawn, spelled out in dead grass letters. Alas for these evil neighbors, the Suburban Avenger had succeeded once again…
I looked up from my bowl of cornflakes and glanced across the street, wondering-just wondering, mind you-if I could get away with it.
In every nearly perfect suburban neighborhood, there is the family that makes it “nearly” instead of “perfect.” In ours, it was the Nabbits. You could find the Nabbit house without a street number. I would sometimes use its distinctive features to guide other people to my own home. “We live across the street from the house with the pick-up truck parked on the lawn,” I’d say. Or, “Look for the old mattress propped up against the side of the garage, then pull into the driveway directly opposite the box springs.”
Sarah Cummings, who owned the pristine property to the right of the Nabbits, had warned us about these troublemakers from the day we moved into the neighborhood. “I call them the ‘Dag Nabbits,’” she said. “Nola Nabbit is a tramp. You watch. If Napolean’s army had been as big as the one that has marched through Nola’s bedroom doors, they’d be speaking French in Moscow today. Daisy, the little girl, is okay. But the kid! He’s a mess.”
The kid was Ricky. Ricky Nabbit, I soon learned, was a frequent guest of the California Youth Authority. He had a seasonal habit of breaking into houses, shoplifting, and other purely selfish acts.
“As long as it’s baseball season,” Sarah told me, “We won’t have any trouble. He’s a baseball nut. But every winter”-here, Sarah shivered-“he robs somebody.”
When Sarah heard that I would be working out of my home, she was elated. “Maybe you can help keep an eye on things,” she said. Specifically, she meant Ricky Nabbit.
We had moved into our home in the spring of the year when Ricky turned fourteen. I would watch him walk home from baseball practice at the nearby park. Skinny, clean-cut, and looking smartly athletic in his uniform, he wore a glove so often, I had visions of him eating with the mitt on his left hand.
Sometimes I would see Ricky sitting on the front porch, oiling his glove, while from inside the house, I heard his mother and her boyfriend shouting obscenities at one another at the top of their lungs. Even with the doors and windows closed, we could hear them. This was especially true during the months when Clyde Who Parks on the Front Lawn reigned over the household.
Clyde was, perhaps, no worse than his predecessors. No more a loudmouth lowlife than Bellamy the Belcher (whose wide-ranging eructative skills included saying the word “breast” as he burped) or Horace the Hornblower (who honked his car horn at all hours, as a mere introduction to rolling down his window and hollering “Nola! Get your ass out here!”). These were not their real names, of course, but my husband and I used this system to refer to them when lamenting our luck.
Nola stayed with Clyde for most of the season, but broke up with him just before the World Series with a world-class drunken brawl in the middle of the street. Nola got a shiner, Clyde got the boot.
Our doorbell rang a few days later, and when I looked out through the peephole, I was surprised to see Daisy standing on our front porch. She had long blond hair and beautiful green eyes, but was shy and slightly overweight. She was carrying a big cardboard box full of canisters of candy.
She stammered out a good afternoon and asked if I would buy some candy for her church school fundraiser.
“Church school?” I asked.
She turned a deep red, and stepped back. If she had been a turtle, I would have been looking at nothing but a shell. I waited, tried to smile my encouragement. She swallowed hard and then explained that she attended a private school operated by a church. The church she named was a conservative Christian sect.
Even though her church school was part of a denomination other than our own, I bought a canister, telling myself that I was doing my bit for ecumenism and good neighborly relations.